Date: 1 Dec 2000 18:28:12 +0000
From: "Mark Delany" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Another issue for my money is that of the lost of instantaneousness
that would result in having to (effectively) retrieve a web page for
each email you read. It sounds silly, but adding a mere second to the
time it takes to pull up an email once you've decided to read the
contents would bug a lot of people.
I would indeed hate that, but it is not implied by the IM2000
architecture. People like us would run programs which would receive
the notification and would automatically retrieve the message onto our
local system before notifying us that there was mail.
Many people today already spend a second each time they read e-mail,
because they use POP or IMAP to download their mail from some possibly
remote system. It's true that the connection to the POP or IMAP
server is more under their control than the connection to some random
other server. But it's still a slowdown that I, for one, find
intolerable, so I arrange for my mail to be automatically sent to my
laptop.
In short the technology is an interesting solution but I wonder
whether the cost/benefit will be as apparent to the general consumer
as the degraded user experience?
The user experience of e-mail for most non-technical users is fairly
bad. People will put up with a great deal.
In practice, if IM2000 is ever implemented, I expect that most
organizations would arrange to automatically download messages to a
stable site under their own control. This is still a benefit overall,
as it shifts responsibility for reliable delivery to the person who
really cares about it.
Ian
